Shortly after I became a manager, I came across a post on Rands in Repose that was new to me: A Disclosure.

Towards the beginning, he briefly talks about the change that happens when you transition to management: You don’t make things anymore. Whatever it was you used to do was probably tangible in a way that your work as a manager isn’t.

Before I became a manager, I was creating and delivering training presentations, writing customer documentation and training materials, and handling support cases. After I was promoted, there was a stretch where I was very much a player/coach. That overlapped somewhat with a period when I was deeply involved in the details of my team’s work because it was clear that we needed to make some significant changes to the way we did the things we did.

As that second period came to a close, I strugged with the loss of tangible output or progress. Especially when I felt defeated by the uphill slog of fighting against organizational inertia, or resource scarcity, or internal indifference. I’d end the day wondering – what did I even DO today? I went to meetings. I sent emails. There’s no real evidence that I’ve done anything substantial.

I was just starting to figure out that there was a little more to it than that, but it all seemed nebulous. Rands explained to me what I was doing, and my role clicked into place. I distilled his writing into a list I tacked up over my desk.

The Six Things You Do As a Manager:

• You are a communication hub.
  • Abstraction & filtering. Synthesis.
• You are multilingual / a translator.
  • Help colleagues understand one another. Make connections.
• The bizarre organizational stuff whizzes by you.
  • Stay composed. Handle it.
• You are the caretaker of No.
  • Defend your team & your business against organizational insanity.
• You provide the structure for moving forward.
  • Say yes, but frame it. Start to light a path through the unknown.
• Trust so you can scale.
  • Teach what you’re good at. Trust the team to do the work.

These were the things I was actually doing. I was producing a constant flow of questions, decisions, actions, and reactions that would eventually add up to something meaningful. My daily output was very different, and sometimes less satisfying than what I was used to. Progress also slowed down and became much more incremental, becuase I’d shifted from working on projects I controlled to initiatives I sometimes didn’t even have influence over.

Once I started to understand my work thorough this perspective, I could see what I’d accomplished each day. The next challenge was coming to terms with the much longer timescale I needed to use to measure my progress.